Aptean ERP review by Inspector Jones

In 2012, two leading enterprise application software companies, CDC Software and Consona Corp., merged to form the company Aptean. Aptean focuses on five primary areas of application: customer relationship management (CRM), desktop automation, supply chain management (SCM), vertical applications and enterprise resource planning (ERP).

Aptean ERP is a scalable ERP solution built on a modular system that integrates manufacturing, distribution and finance functionality to enable process manufacturers to achieve their business goals.

Aptean helps process manufacturers to keep pace with changes in regulations and compliance, to grow as market leaders and to quickly adapt to changes in their industry and marketplace. The ERP can also be quickly implemented and scaled to fit evolving business needs.

Just a Few of Aptean ERP’s key features include:

Financial

• Manage chart of accounts, currencies, fiscal calendars, balance types and accounting periods
• Use vendor and customer diaries for more efficient business management
• Leverage multi currency capabilities
• Automatically create sales or purchase invoices
• Create detailed financial reports and organize them by job/activity or product
• Manage costs by allocating overhead costs to a specific product

Distribution

• Manage purchasing orders and requisitions, MRP purchases, maintenance, receiving and invoice vouchering, and more
• Maintain accurate inventory balances
• Define and track products and locations
• Manage special promotions
• Leverage smart functionality for shipping, invoicing, order entry, sales analysis and credit memos
• Gain deeper visibility into shipping and distribution fleets

Manufacturing

• Use flexible measurement units, batch scaling, input/output process specifications, product and job costing, individual location specifications and material inputs
• Record machine and labor times, job status, performance and product outputs and process variables
• Access critical information, such as yield reports, when needed

TraceExpress

• Accurately report lot trace information
• Improve visibility into product lot activity and quality history
• Easily access information to improve reporting and compliance with industry and government regulations
• Leverage functionality in forward and backward tracking, defective lot tracking and mid-production tracing

Customer Portal

• Easily post new content, such as product specifications and graphics, to your website without needing the help of IT
• Run targeted marketing promotions
• Provide immediate order/shipping status reports to customers
• Answer availability questions
• Allow customers to place orders online
• Provide order histories
• Control access with role-based administration and security

Ease of use

Aptean ERP’s slogan “Building Flexibility, Control and Improved Visibility for Regulated Industries” is, for the most part, right on point. Regulated manufacturing businesses facing stringent reporting requirements for serial number tracking, engineering change tracking and quality management is all streamlined by Aptean ERP.

Customer Service

Aptean offers a wide array of comprehensive support services, and was able to quickly and accurately answer any of the technical questions I had.

Problems and Complaints

I can’t say that I found too many things wrong with Aptean ERP that would cause me to complain. It is a sound system with a ton of room to add on and offers plenty of power under the hood.

However, if I had to come up with one complaint to stay balanced (and I do), I would have to say that, in my opinion, they could make the system a little easier to understand during the setup. Even that isn’t a huge problem, however, I think first impressions are important with applications, as with everything.

In Conclusion

Aptean is extremely strong in the process manufacturing industries. The user interface presentation has utilized the newest software technologies and the development team has designed the interface which now offers users an incredibly fast, feature rich and easy to use experience.